In the new issue of Regulation, economist Pierre Lemieux argues that the recent oil price decline is at least partly the result of increased supply from the extraction of shale oil. The increased supply allows the economy to produce more goods, which benefits some people, if not all of them. Thus, contrary to some commentary in the press, cheaper oil prices cannot harm the economy as a whole.

Two long wars, chronic deficits, the financial crisis, the costly drug war, the growth of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, and the revelations about NSA abuses, have given rise to a growing libertarian movement in our country – with a greater focus on individual liberty and less government power. David Boaz’s newly released The Libertarian Mind is a comprehensive guide to the history, philosophy, and growth of the libertarian movement, with incisive analyses of today’s most pressing issues and policies.

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Tag: Washington Post

In a Washington Postop-ed laying out his thoughts on the federal role in education, Gov. Jeb Bush wrote, “We are long overdue in setting the lines of authority so clearly.” Alas, the lines he offered would furnish just the sort of “clarity” that has led to nearly limitless federal control over schooling without any meaningful evidence of lasting improvement.

The true heart of what Bush wrote was not his declaration about setting lines, but the three justifications he offered for federal intervention. Washington, he wrote:

should work to create transparency so that parents can see how their local schools measure up; it should support policies that have a proven record; and it should make sure states can’t ignore students who need extra help.

All of this is what has gotten us to the de facto state of federal control we are currently in:

“Transparency” has come to mean federally driven tests and curriculum standards – the Common Core – because under No Child Left Behind states had been defining “proficiency” for themselves, and it wasn’t sufficiently “transparent” for some people whether “proficient” kids in Mississippi were as educated as those in Massachusetts. Of course, you can’t have much more complete federal control than Washington deciding what students are taught.

Making sure states “can’t ignore students who need extra help” has also been used to justify national standards and tests. Indeed, it underlies everything Washington does. Sayeth federal politicians, “Some groups aren’t doing so well, and since we spend money to end that we’d better dictate terms. So let’s connect all that money to school nutrition guidelines, teacher evaluations, English and math content, school opening times…”

Quite simply, in setting his lines, Gov. Bush set no lines. Thankfully for him, lines of federal authority have already been drawn. Indeed, they were set centuries ago: the Constitution gives the federal government no authority to impose transparency, offer help, or anything other than prohibit discrimination by state and local governments and govern federal lands.

As I’ve noted before, obeying the Constitution would save folks like Gov. Bush a lot of reinventing work. More importantly, it would save everyone else expensive, ineffectual trouble.

Once again, the Washington Post’s education blogger, Valerie Strauss, failed to do her due diligence before posting a hit piece on school choice. A year ago, she falsely claimed that scholarship tax credit programs benefit corporate donors and wealthy recipients. In fact, donors break even at most and the best evidence suggests that low-income families are the primary beneficiaries even in the few programs that are not means-tested. Unfortunately, Strauss has still failed to issue a correction.

Now Strauss has posted an op-ed from an anti-school choice activist in Florida that contains numerous additional errors, which the good folks at RedefinED.org have thoroughly debunked, including the following canard:

“Any way you look at it, private entities receive public tax dollars with no accountability.”

One can certainly debate whether there is sufficient accountability, but there is certainly more than none. All scholarship students take state-approved nationally norm referenced tests such as the Stanford 10 or Terra Nova. The gain scores are reported publicly, both at the state level and for every school with 30 or more tested scholarship students. Additionally, schools with $250,000 or more in scholarship funds must submit independent financial reports to the state.

Not only did the op-ed’s author fail to correctly explain the law, she failed to understand that school choice is accountability. As explained in an open letter that the Cato Institute recently issued along with the Heritage Foundation, Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, and others: “True accountability comes not from top-down regulations but from parents financially empowered to exit schools that fail to meet their child’s needs.”

Moreover, the claim that “private entities receive public tax dollars” is also false. The money flows from private donors to private nonprofits to private citizens to spend on their children’s tuition at private schools. That the donors receive a tax credit does not transmogrify their donation into “public” money. Indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that this view erroneously “assumes that income should be treated as if it were government property even if it has not come into the tax collector’s hands. Private bank accounts cannot be equated with the … State Treasury.” Likewise, neither tax deductions for donations to a church nor the church’s own property tax exemption mean that churches are therefore funded by “public tax dollars.”

The Washington Post has an in-house fact-checking team. They should not have to rely on RedefinED.org or others to ensure the veracity of what their bloggers post.

Today the Washington Posthas a story, also featured in their DC-area radio ads, about how some states are looking to change the name of the Common Core, but not the substance, because the brand has gotten too toxic. That the Post has so prominently run such a story shows just how noxious the fumes surrounding the Common Core curriculum standards have become, and it’s great that the paper is shining a light on dubious efforts to quell opposition. But within the story itself are several examples illustrating why, even as disgust over the Core grows, the average person doesn’t know how truly foul much about the Core is.

The Post certainly makes clear how some states are trying to cover the Core’s stench with perfume rather than attack its rot. Basically, states such as Arizona and Iowa are just changing the Core’s name. Speaking to the Council of Chief State School Officers, one of the two professional organizations that created the Core, likely Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee captured the tactic in one, succinct sentence: “Rebrand it, refocus it, but don’t retreat.”

That doesn’t sound like addressing people’s serious concerns. It sounds like, well, deception—alas, nothing new in the Common Core sales job.

Unfortunately, the Post’s story is itself guilty of Core-tilted inaccuracy, though whether knowingly or unknowingly is impossible to tell. And the Post is hardly alone among media outlets in these failings.

There’s no more crucial an example of this than the piece’s description of the Obama administration’s role in getting states to adopt the Core. Twice the article says the administration gave its “endorsement” to the Core, as if the President simply blurbed the back cover of the standards or was filmed hauling lumber in his Ford Common Core 150.

But the administration didn’t just say “Man, this Core is great!” No, it told states that if they wanted to compete for part of the $4.35-billion Race to the Top—a chunk of the “Stimulus”—they had to promise to adopt the Core. And if they wanted waivers from the almost universally disliked No Child Left Behind Act, they would have only one option other than the Core to show that their standards were “college and career ready.”

A Washington Posteditorial today pushes back against the argument that a Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement would exacerbate income inequality. Amen, I suppose. But in making its case, the editorial burns the village to save it by conceding as fact certain destructive myths that undergird broad skepticism about trade and unify its opponents.

“All else being equal,” the editorial reads, “firms move where labor is cheapest.” Presumably, by “all else being equal,” the editorial board means: if the quality of the factors of production were the same; if skill sets were identical; if workers were endowed with the same capital; if all production locations had equal access to ports and rail; if the proximity of large markets and other nodes in the supply chain were the same; if institutions supporting the rule of law were comparably rigorous or lax; if the risks of asset expropriation were the same; if regulations and taxes were identical; and so on, the final determinant in the production location decision would be the cost of labor. Fair enough. That untestable premise may be correct.

But back in reality, none of those conditions is equal. And what do we see? We see investment flowing (sometimes in the form of “firms mov[ing],” but more often in the form of firms supplementing domestic activities) to rich countries, not poor. In this recent study, I reported statistics from the Bureau of Economic Analysis revealing that:

Nearly three quarters of the $5.2 trillion stock of U.S.-owned direct investment abroad is concentrated in Europe, Canada, Japan, Australia, and Singapore. Contrary to persistent rumors, only 1.3 percent of the value of U.S.-outward FDI [foreign direct investment] was in China at the end of 2011.

Last week, a New Hampshire trial court declared that the state’s nascent scholarship tax credit (STC) program could not fund students attending religious schools. The Granite State’s STC program grants tax credits to corporations worth 85 percent of their contributions to nonprofit scholarship organizations that aid low- and middle-income students attending the schools of their choice.

Writing on the Washington Post’sAnswer Sheet blog, Professor Kevin Welner of the University of Colorado at Boulder mocked supporters of the program who criticized the decision. Welner argues that school choice advocates should have expected this decision, declaring that it was “unsurprising” that the court should find the program (partially) unconstitutional. But what Welner calls unsurprising is actually unprecedented.

Only toward the bottom of his post does Welner reveal that the only high courts to address the issue thus far—the U.S. Supreme Court and the Arizona supreme court—have ruled STC programs constitutional in their entirety. Indeed, though all but two of the remaining ten states with STC programs have similar “Blaine Amendment” provisions in their state constitutions, opponents haven’t even bothered to challenge their constitutionality. Additionally, other state courts have ruled on the question of whether tax credits constitute “public money” in a manner consistent with the previous STC cases, demonstrating that the courts’ rulings were not the aberrations that Welner imagines them to be.

If school choice supporters had a reason not to be surprised, it was because the ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State shrewdly went judge shopping. That’s why they brought their lawsuit in Strafford County instead of Merrimack County, where the state capital is located. Their strategy seemed to pay off, as the judge’s decision relies heavily on the dissenting opinions in the U.S. Supreme Court and Arizona supreme court decisions, and misapplies the limited precedent from New Hampshire. Nevertheless, the final decision rests with the New Hampshire supreme court. As I detail below, logic and precedent suggest that they should overturn the lower court’s decision.

I’ve written a lot recently about the untoward tactics being employed by supporters of the Common Core national curriculum standards. I’m afraid little seems to be changing, as illustrated by two new bits of evidence.

The first is a survey in Tennessee by the Core-supporting State Collaborative on Reforming Education. The survey – which has gotten significant coverage across the Volunteer State – supposedly shows that Tennesseans just love the Common Core. As the Knoxville Newssuccinctly put it in its headline, “3 in 4 Tennesseans Favor Common Core Standards.” The article goes on to report that “after hearing a brief description about the standards, about 76 percent of voters support their implementation, with 44 percent ‘strongly’ favoring them.”

Well, that seems like an open-and-shut case for the Common…wait a minute. What was that “description” respondents heard?

Checking out the brief summary SCORE put out about its survey, it appears to be the following (see note 1):

Now, just so everyone taking this survey has the same information, let me tell you some more about these Common Core State Standards. These new standards were developed by states and have been set to internationally competitive levels in English and math. This means that students may be more challenged by the material they study, and the tests they take will measure more advanced concepts and require students to show their work. Knowing this, do you favor or oppose implementing these new Common Core State Standards?

Really? “Just so everyone…has the same information”? Gimme a break.

This is, of course, a classic loaded question designed to get a positive response. How many people are going to oppose “internationally competitive” standards by which children will be “challenged”? Forget that curriculumexperts hardly all agree with this assertion. Then, it says that the standards were “developed by states” when, in fact, they were not: the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers are not states. Finally, it completely ignores that the federal government coerced state adoption of the Core – the main concern of the Core’s most vocal opponents – and did so before the final standards had even been published. If you’re going to include highly dubious assertions, and exclude crucial concerns, you might as well just say “the Common Core is terrific, has no down sides, and will be great for your kids. Now, do you favor or oppose terrific standards that will surely help your children?”

In other news, Delaware Governor Jack Markell (D) took to the pages of the Washington Post today to defend the Common Core against a Post report on Tea Party opposition to the Core. Alas, it was a typical defense, based as much on smearing Core opponents, and ignoring crucial federal involvement, as discussing the Core’s merits.

Markell starts with a straw man, citing the Post article as saying that Tea Party people argue that the Common Core was developed by the Feds. No such assertion appears in the article. Markell then suggests that Common Core was controlled by “state leaders” without saying who they were, perhaps because the NGA and CCSSO employees in charge of the effort were not “state leaders.” Moreover, he implies that somehow for standards to be high, and our nation internationally competitive, standards must be national. He offers no meaningful arguments for these things, and ignores the significant empirical evidence against such superficial assumptions.

Perhaps the most egregious – but typical – of his piece’s failings are two. The first is the absence of any mention of Race to the Top or NCLB waivers (not to mention federal funding and selection of national tests) that are the concrete federal actions that utterly justify anyone’s worries about federal control. They are also just the kinds of actions supporters asked for. And the second? Smearing the Tea Party as “fringe” kooks who, it is implied, only peddle myths.

Given what we’re seeing from many Core supporters, that last bit is ironic, isn’t it?

Ever since Obamacare became law, I have been counseling states not to establish the law’s health insurance “exchanges,” in part because:

to create an Exchange is to create a taxpayer-funded lobbying group dedicated to fighting repeal. An Exchange’s employees would owe their power and their paychecks to this law. Naturally, they would aid the fight to preserve the law.

California was the first state both to reject my advice and to prove my point.

They claimed that health plans offered through Covered California in 2014 will cost the same or less than health insurance costs today. “The rates submitted to Covered California for the 2014 individual market,” they wrote, “ranged from two percent above to 29 percent below the 2013 average premium for small employer plans in California’s most populous regions.”

See? No rate shock. California’s top Obamacare bureaucrat, Peter Lee, declared his agency had hit “a home run for consumers.” Awesome!

Unfortunately, anyone who knows anything about health insurance or Obamacare knew instantly that this claim was bogus, for three reasons.

Obamacare or no Obamacare, health insurance premiums rise from year to year, and almost always by more than 2 percent. So right off the bat, the fact that Covered California claimed that premiums would generally fall means they’re hiding something.

Obamacare’s requirement that insurers cover all “essential health benefits” will force most people who purchase coverage on the “individual” market (read: directly from health insurance companies) to purchase more coverage than they purchase today. This will increase premiums for most everyone in that market.

Obamacare’s community-rating price controls (also known as its “pre-existing conditions” provisions) will increase premiums for some consumers (i.e., the healthy) and reduce premiums for others (i.e., the sick). So it is misleading for Covered California to focus on averages because averages can hide some pretty drastic premium increases and decreases.